ULI Idaho Blog

Richard Florida Notes Unexpected Effects of the Creative Class’s Rise

Urban theorist Richard Florida vaulted into prominence in 2004 with his book The Rise of the Creative Class, which described how growing clusters of knowledge workers in urban areas were reshaping the economy and determining which places thrived or withered.

As Florida explained in a talk at the 2017 ULI Fall Meeting in Los Angeles, that trend turned out to be faster and more powerful than his forecast—and it came with negative consequences that he had not foreseen.